Artificial Intelligence tool to make diagnoses during surgery - CIO News

To help make real-time diagnoses during surgery, an artificial intelligence tool has been developed, improving the quality of images to increase the accuracy of rapid diagnostics, a new study has shown. According to the study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the method leverages artificial intelligence to translate between frozen sections and the gold-standard approach. "We are using the power of artificial intelligence to address an age-old problem at the intersection of surgery and pathology," said the corresponding author of the study Faisal Mahmood, PhD, of the Division of Computational Pathology at US-based Brigham and Women's Hospital. "Making a rapid diagnosis from frozen tissuae samples is challenging and requires specialised training, but this kind of diagnosis is a critical step in caring for patients during surgery," he added. Pathologists use formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples to make final diagnoses – this method preserves tissue in a way that produces high-quality images but is labour-intensive and can take several days, according to the study. Mahmood and co-authors developed a deep-learning model that can be used to translate between frozen sections and more commonly used FFPE tissue.